Posted by alexandra_k on December 5, 2005, at 19:36:23
In reply to Re: » alexandra_k, posted by Damos on December 5, 2005, at 18:43:05
> > are intense emotions always illogical????
> >
> > <sob>
> Please don't cry you. I think the answer to this is no.oh. was i over-generalising ;-)
> I don't think that strong emotion can be simply dismissed as 'cognitive distortion' and would probably want to smack someone in the mouth if they said that to me. How totally invalidating and generally devastating to tell someone that.:-(
yeah, thats how i felt...
but then... is that because i'm sub-consciously endorsing yet another cognitive error???> Yep the circles are a problem,
yeah.
> but the initial thing is prior to conscious thought surely (please, it would make me feel better).
yes. at least... it definately is sometimes. they found... they can present information subliminally. i think it might be... less that 250 milliseconds. if they flash a picture at you and then it is gone you cannot verbally report what the picture was of. they flashed pictures of mushrooms, snakes, and spiders at people. they found... people who had a snake phobia had a heightened SGR (skin galvinisation response - 'affective response') to snakes but not spiders or mushrooms. people who had a spider phobia had a heightened SGR to spiders but not snakes or mushrooms. people who didn't have a phobia had baseline SGR to all three.
Thats supposed to be the evidence that you can have an emotional response to stimuli that are not accessible to conscious experience (where 'conscious experience' is defined as being able to verbally report on the stimulus features that induced the emotion).
of course... a heightened SGR isn't the best measure of emotion... I don't know whether any of the phobic people went on to have a full blown panic attack in response to the subliminal stimuli or not... If they did... Well thats not so nice for them of course... But it would lend more plausibility to the thesis that you can have full blown emotional responses (rather than SGR which seem a bit 'basic' to constitute emotional responses because people have heightened SGR in the absence of what we would typically consider to be emotion).
sigh.
Gosh, should feeling and emotions even be thought of as being logical or illogical, hmm, just don't think so.
... People are working on it... We talk about beliefs being rational or irrational (delusional for example). It is thought that emotions might be comperably rational or irrational (though we might be better to think of them as 'appropriate' or 'inappropriate'.
I have been reading a bit about emotions...
I saw a book a while back called "emotional intelligence". I thought it was a bit of pop-psychology crap but have seen a few academic references to the notion of emotional intelligence. I don't know what book I'll find with the link... And I don't know whether it was that book in particular they had in mind or whether more academic work has been done on it.
It is similar (I think) to the idea of Macheavellian emotions (and I know I did a typo...)
The thought is that we communicate via language to inform other people of our inner states (e.g. of our beliefs...
And we communicate via expression of emotion to inform other people of our inner states ( our emotions) so they know how we are likely to behave.
And thus... The function of emotions... Might be communicative.
Hmm.
> Interesting, interesting, interesting.
yeah.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:575153
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20051205/msgs/585881.html